A Nervous Splendor

by Frederic Morton

  It had been better earlier. The successful artisan of the 1830s enjoyed an understanding with the universe which the successful manufacturer of the 1880s had lost. In 1830 a master carpenter, fashioning an escritoire for the Duke under His Grace’s supervision, had lived in a personalized world with his customers, his apprentices, his family. Like the Duke, though on a lower scale, he practiced the give and take of a small face-to-face hierarchy.

  But the manufacturer of the 1880s never saw the Duke except from a humiliating distance at the opera. In a city where Court and courtier modeled most social images, the industrialist received no access to courtliness. The Crown just threw him some glorified scraps. He was allowed to purchase certain plots of the Ringstrasse; outrageous sums paid by eager nouveaus like him financed the Court Opera in which he could be snubbed. And the Ringstrasse palazzo he raised for himself was a pseudo-Florentine futility. Aristocrats flew past it in their coaches without even bothering to sneer. Austrian nobility was ancient, exclusive, rigorously pedigreed. It treated the mushrooming burgherdom—like a fungus.

  Earlier and more conclusively than elsewhere, a piece of bad news came to the arriviste in Vienna: he would never really arrive. Worse yet, he found himself cut off from his point of departure. The human contact a master craftsman had once had with his men and his clients dissolved for the manufacturer into the abstractions governing factory efficiency. He could line his living room in satin. He could not give his life organic texture. Yet, outside the Austrian borders, his confreres gave the nineteenth century its middle-class tone. Just before the French Revolution, Bourbon courtiers had already exchanged the aristocratic sword for the bourgeois walking stick. During the Napoleonic Wars, Wellington had to reprove his British officers for carrying umbrellas. And Beau Brummel, a shopkeeper’s grandson, became the tyrant dandy who took English fashion from courtier’s breeches to businessman’s trousers and from the tricorne to the top hat.

  A painter named Hans Makart was Vienna’s reverse Beau Brummel. Born in 1840, the year Brummel died, he preened his way through the capital in a direction opposite to Brummel’s: away from bourgeois self-authentication. In England, Brummel had retailored the nobleman in the image of the smart banker; in Austria, Makart managed the contrary. He ended the popularity of the Biedermeier style, the bourgeoisie’s own mild vogue, and decked out the uncertain banker’s house as a fustian baronial hall. Though Makart was four years dead by 1888, the salons of Vienna’s rich were still heavy with his plumes and silks and drapery and historicist surfeits.

  And vainness. In 1888 several good London clubs catered to the merchant prince. In Vienna only the Jockey Club counted, and it was hermetically restricted to nobility. Merchants entered and left by the tradesmen’s door. No matter how high the pile of ducats on which a Viennese burgher squatted, he squatted there at an altitude far below the blueblood’s. He never came to possess the feistiness of the cockney millionaire, the smug spirit of the Parisian haut bourgeois, the go of the Yankee trader. Vienna’s feudal aureole was too brilliant and too constant—it seared any flowering of a middle-class life-style.

  Let a plain man labor greatly, accumulate greatly, succeed greatly; let him ride the crest of industrialization, control vast wealth and even procure a baronetcy; let him build the machines and the organizations generating a great Austrian potential in times to come. Let him do all that—and where was his own greatness? Where could his heart and soul connect to the forward swell he himself had powered?

  Even paragons of their class like the Wittgensteins foundered in their very splendor. Hermann Wittgenstein, originally a Jew of unspectacular means, became a rich Protestant in the mid-nineteenth century by practicing farming as a large-scale enterprise. His pursuit of culture was similarly efficient. To be more precise: he seeded Kultur with his money, he sired Kultur in his children. Joseph Joachim, the renowned violinist, was related to him by marriage, and he financed Joachim’s apprenticeship under Mendelssohn. His daughter Anna studied the piano with Johannes Brahms.

  But the chief phenomenon among his children turned out to be Karl. Running away to America in his teens, Karl taught not only the violin but also Latin and Greek at the Christian Brothers School in New York. At twenty he returned to Vienna and kept playing sonatas through the nights while preparing by day for one of the most gigantic business careers in history. With little help from his family, it took him less than two decades to become the Empire’s premier industrialist. He was forty-one years old in 1888 and controlled a vast complex of factories, including virtually all Bohemian steelworks, the industrial hub of the Monarchy.

  This peer of Skoda and Krupp followed his father and made his mansion a temple of the arts. His children immersed and exhausted themselves in creativity. Daughter Hermine Wittgenstein would be midwife to art nouveau through its embattled beginnings. Daughter Margaret Wittgenstein would support Klimt by commissioning portraits of herself; in her later years, a champion of Freud, she would help the doctor’s escape from the Third Reich. Her brother Paul Wittgenstein would lose his right arm yet reach such eminence as a concert pianist that Maurice Ravel would write the Concerto for the Left Hand for him. His brother Kurt Wittgenstein played the cello with exceptional skill while Hans, the eldest, was a virtuoso on several instruments. And through the youngest boy, Ludwig (in his mother’s belly in 1888), the family name would spread as an intellectual byword. Ludwig Wittgenstein would haunt the philosophy of the next century as Mahler would its music.

  Did the Wittgensteins live the Viennese haut bourgeois triumph? They illustrated its tragedy. Karl Wittgenstein’s daughters suffered from manageable neuroses. His sons were blighted. A number of Ludwig Wittgenstein’s letters are ruminations on suicide. Three of his four brothers—Hans, Rudi and Kurt—killed themselves.

  They had ordered things better in the aristocracy. The founder of a noble line might have swashbuckled his way into a princedom. His descendants, open handed and self-indulgent, had loved the arts the way they loved the fox hunt. They bought the child Mozart chocolates and hired Haydn to compose symphonies for their private orchestras. These patrons of earlier times had been genuine dilettantes, i.e., delight-takers.

  Not so the fin-de-siècle manufacturers who imitated the mode. In evening clothes their diligence was no less than in a business suit. Startling talents and great coups might mark their lives, but only rarely a happy flair. Grimly they perfected their avocations. The Wittgensteins, who were business corsairs of the first order and whose cultural gifts matched any clan’s—not one of them could take delight. No matter how great their boardroom prodigies, how heroic their cultivation of things esthetic, they did not truly savor either their cartels or their salons. To their children they left an opulent joylessness, a hothouse of silk blossoms without breath, without roots.

  And there was something ultimately unsatisfying even about liberalism, the bourgeois public stance. Liberalism wanted to eliminate any unfair privileges the Church still enjoyed, whether in the tax structure or the school system. Yet once upon a time religion and ritual had provided the burghers with an inner buttress for which their progressive politics now were no substitute. As liberals they wanted to change a governmental scheme weighted to favor the aristocracy—yet their hearts beat faster before the feudal gleam their parliamentarians attacked. In principle they favored electoral reform. Yet in practice they opposed universal suffrage. Retention of the five-gulden poll tax kept the full, dread force of the working class away from the ballot box.

  No, the Viennese bourgeoisie didn’t come off well in the class struggle. In the fall of 1888 Viktor Adler was already discussing with Europe’s other socialist leaders the idea of an annual world-wide workers’ festival, to be proclaimed in 1889 and to be organized fully in the year following. The first May Day in 1890 would produce an orderly march of laborers in Vienna and a great deal of much less decorous cringing on the part of their employers. “Soldiers are standing by,” the Neue Freie Presse, grand organ of the bourgeoisie,
would report on the occasion. “Food is being hoarded as though for an impending siege, everybody’s mind is weighed down by grave worries…This fear is humiliating and would never have arisen if the middle class had not sunk so low, if it had not lost all confidence…”

  But how should it have discovered confidence in the first place In Vienna one’s identity was molded by the past. The nobles, of course, anchored their rights in immemorial usage. The workers would soon call on the fraternal solidarity left over from the guild system. But the manufacturer? He was a noisy arrival from nowhere in particular. Confidence was hard to come by for a man with a silk hat but no roots. Yet he had to confront historic castes above and below—and, in addition, he must maneuver against his own kind in “the free competition of the marketplace” that was the one article of his faith. What tints and shapes of the past justified his stature? What hallowing precedent sustained him? What culturally grounded emotion fortified his politics?

  None. Politics was a puzzle to Vienna’s bourgeois of the 1880s. But esthetic and neurasthenic introspection—those were their métier. They were always trying to find themselves individually since, unlike other classes, they couldn’t do so collectively.

  Why hast thou lived? Why hast thou suffered?

  Somewhere they had misplaced their souls in a world they had changed. Of course they tried to be proud of this novel world while, at the same time, trying to overcome embarrassment over their own newness. They were irremediably new in a city where only old families had the self-confidence to look ahead. Being new, they were ipso facto sweaty, coarse, raw. All around them exemplars of accomplishment wore ancient quarterings.

  The bourgeois’s problem was the opposite of Rudolf’s. For him, centuries of cachet were only a heraldic encumbrance. He hoped to liberate himself and the aged Monarchy through the fresh skills of the middle class. Yet just these skills had led many of the middle class toward a vacuum. Some did a convulsive about-face. Since it was so strangely empty to be new, they must head for something old, that is for an artificed antiquity.

  An example of just that was the Schönerer clan. The father of the leading anti-Semite of the day had risen from civil engineer to chief executive of the giant railway lines founded by the Rothschilds. In 1860 Franz Joseph had raised him from commoner to baronet. Promptly he’d purchased a fourteenth-century Lower Austrian estate in Rosenau complete with Maria Theresia castle.

  Technically, Schönerer Senior had become the member of an aristocracy for which he had neither the psychological conditioning nor the social standing. An appointed nobleman, he’d found himself invisible to those whose grandfathers had been born with titles. But he was old and died before too long. His son Georg and his daughter Alexandrine inherited social vulnerability along with wealth. This ambivalence drove the prominent careers of both brother and sister.

  Georg von Schönerer became the violent pan-German politician who helped spoil the Emperor’s birthday in 1888. The manifesto of his party assailed the same Jewish capital which had generated his father’s millions. Young Schönerer attacked it in order to glorify a pre-capitalist, pre-bourgeois ideal: he worshipped the idea of Germania as it had been two thousand years ago, ancient and pure. Germania restored would reunite once more all true-blooded Teutonic tribes in Europe. And he, the Knight of Rosenau, as he liked to be called, would be the leader of that homecoming. He would slay the dragon Jew, that capitalist demon of all subversive change. He announced a new calendar whose Year One was the year of the battle of Teutoburg Forest in which Hermann, the great Germanic hero, had defeated the Roman legions: Now Schönerer would defeat the Semitic polluters and restore the German nation to its clean and noble simplicities of old.

  In the 1880s his crusade never attracted more than a coterie of fanatics. But in the next decade his rantings still echoed through the campaign promises that helped elect his more moderate fellow traveler, Karl Lueger, Mayor of Vienna.* And in the end Schönerer found the ear of the perfect heir. Mein Kampf rings with praise for the visions (if not for the political ineptitude) of the Knight of Rosenau. The Knight in turn would have seen his program fulfilled in the chimneys of Auschwitz.

  During the fall of 1888 Georg von Schönerer sat in jail for beating up Jews. At the same time his sister Alexandrine embarked on a vocation that seems surprisingly different from her brother’s. Four years earlier, in 1884, she had purchased the Theater an der Wien, the city’s leading operetta house. Now she prepared to take over as its Managing Director. Late in 1888 she began her career as the Ziegfeld of operetta. A former actress become entrepreneur—the class her brother Georg despised—she was a lifelong liberal on the friendliest of terms with many Jews.

  Still, Alexandrine’s light muse played on emotions exploited by Georg’s ideology. In their very different ways both used the nostalgia of a bewildered middle class—nostalgia for the romantic yesteryear it had never had. The typical libretto of an operetta produced by Alexandrine von Schönerer sang of some princely glamour which would, despite scoundrels conspiring against it, triumph in three-quarter time. In The Gypsy Baron the gypsy child regains its escutcheon after many a tuneful adventure. In Die Fledermaus the machinations of hero and villain revolve around the prospect of a prince’s soiree. What tripped across sister Schönerer’s stage with lilt and humor was snarled through brother Schönerer’s clenched teeth: a marvelous nobility will be reclaimed against all vulgar resistance—and he, Schönerer himself, will confirm his knighthood with his heroic mission.

  Another parallel to the brother’s savage politics was the waltz on which his sister’s operettas surged—the wild and giddy Viennese waltz that had superseded the reasoned measures of the minuet. Indeed, the waltz with its despair hidden deep inside the gorgeous vortex, the waltz whose rhythm overwhelmed the quadrille as today rock has overwhelmed the fox-trot—the waltz was dark whirligig intoxication engulfing the hopeful, target-happy, progressive straight line.

  “African and hot-blooded, crazy with life,” an observer said, not of the Rolling Stones but of nineteenth-century Vienna swept up in the waltz, “restless…passionate…the devil is loose here.”

  Yes, perhaps in Vienna the devil was loose first. Here the energies of alienation built up fastest. Elsewhere the shopkeeper lands of the West continued to do business more securely blinkered by burgher certitudes which had never hardened by the Danube; elsewhere the middle class, believing in debit-credit truisms, remained shielded a bit longer from its own rootlessness. But in Vienna its distress could already be manipulated by a von Schönerer. And soon it would be diagnosed by Freud, the first specialist in bourgeois Angst.

  In Vienna, as the rewards of modernity became uncertain earlier, its psychic risks were thrown into relief sooner. Progress from feudal to bourgeois, from provincial to urban, turned out to be a dubious good—and doubts that cloud the faith of an era will excite its geniuses.

  Freud’s, Mahler’s and Schnitzler’s grandfathers had been artisans or merchants in small-town Jew Streets. Bruckner’s grandfather was a village schoolteacher; Hugo Wolf’s grandfather a tanner; Klimt’s a tobacconist. Now all their grandsons had broken through into competitive middle-class status in Vienna. Which is another way of saying that they had completed the process of breaking away from organic ties and breaking out of traditional frameworks; and that they had achieved such ruptures in a metropolis where the grace period between emancipation and a resulting erosion was all too brief. Consciously or not, these grandsons used their gifts to ask, through insight or esthetic instrument, the alpha question: Why dost thou live in such a glitteringly corroded world? Why suffer in it? How can we see, or hear, or paint, or understand, what we have lost and what we are aching to regain?

  Anti-Semitism, operetta, psychoanalysis: three contributions from Austria’s fin de siècle. One impulse motivated them all, namely the quest for a way out of present-day bourgeois frustration into a magic and revelatory past. A great searching sprang from the neurasthenia of a class with which Rudolf was
prophetically concerned. It seems fitting that the Crown Prince’s death drama should have started during the fall of 1888 with parvenu ferment as embodied, seductively, in the person of Mary Vetsera.

  * * *

  * After he assumed high office, Lueger’s anti-Semitism became largely rhetorical. His excellence as an administrator makes him Vienna’s best-remembered mayor.

  Chapter 8

  Sometime in September of the year Count Georg von Larisch and his wife Marie were invited to dinner at the Vetsera Palais in the Salesianergasse in Vienna. Only the Countess went. Her husband, being old nobility, preferred not to share a table with a family so new. The widowed Baroness Helen Vetsera was extremely nouveau. She was also known for her strong social aspirations, many of which were considered ungratifiable.

  Countess Marie Larisch, then, ran into a surprise. At the Vetsera soiree she found a genuine duke, Miguel de Braganza of the Portuguese royal family no less. It piqued her still more to learn that it was he who had sent the magnificent roses displayed on a mantelpiece—an offering from His Grace to Mary, the Baroness’s seventeen-year-old daughter.